Sadly Celestia 1.6 crashes after loading a few 8k textures. I think it is because the 32 bit architecture and the RAM memory limit....It would be a HUGE help, if the celestia.Sci development team would be so kind to release a 64 bit version of ANY Celestia 1.6+ code.

The limitation rather resides with your graphics card. What graphics do you use, actually? I guess the max. texture size will be 8k (8192)! That's the point where you should use my texture tools and convert your textures into VT tiles...

As an illustration, compare next the OpenGL Infos for two of my computers: one using Windows 10 with a Nvidia 940MX external GPU, while the other one has only Intel HD3000 onboard graphics. In both cases, the 64bit celestia.Sci code is identical.

Intel HD3000[Click on image for better readability]

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8k_MaxTexSize_HD3000.jpg [ 77.05 KiB | Viewed 1501 times ]

Here you see that despite my 64bit celestia.Sci code, the max. texture size is also limited to 8192kB, while with the Nvidia 940MX graphics, 16k textures are allowed!

Nvidia 940MX[Click on image for better readability]

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16k_MaxTexSize_Win10_NV940mx.jpg [ 118.72 KiB | Viewed 1501 times ]

In my many years of developing Celestia and celestia.Sci I have often experienced crashes associated with texture sizes exceeding the given maximum size. Using my texture tools, I recently produced an interesting set of VT tiles for the major celestial bodies. All had the same 16k resolution and proper normal map data were available. I can tell you there is absolute stability and zooming etc is extremely smooth. For the normal maps I used the dedicated dxt5nm format, while the surface textures are all in dxt3. I am thinking about releasing such a set together with celestia.Sci. Note that the DXT format is natively supported by the GPU and thus very fast / economic!

When the crash occurs the paging file is cca. 3.5 GB. Celestia 1.6 is crashing for example at 1437MB RAM.

RAM data is building very slowly (with maybe 30s-1 minute "screen freezes"), but CPU usage is never above 50%.

And suddenly Celestia crashes, but not before loading a LOT of textures.

I talked about it on the other forum with Selden who wrote that a 2GB RAM usage is kind of a maximum for Celestia 1.6.

So in my opinion not the 8k texture usage is the problem in itself, but rather the fact that a lot of planets are loading their 8k textures (bump, surface, specular) all at once (like in the TRAPPIST-1 system, when I have 2 or 3 alternative planets for every real one on a close parallel orbit).

Celestia 1.6 simply cannot use more memory, not even with a 4GB patch.

I don't really see how can it be a graphic card problem...but please explain it...

what does your Help->OpenGL Info designate as Maximum texture size?? If it's 8k you should not be surprised if the loading of several 8k sized textures produces a crash. If it's 16k you stand a better chance.

My experience is moreover that Linux produces far less of such ad hoc crashes than Windows. The memory administration of the two OS is certainly different.

With textures not exceeding 8k, I don't generate any crashes in any OS.

I use only DXT1 format textures for surface and specular textures and PNG for bump maps.

DXT1 has a better compression, but quality is less. Years ago I did extensive studies showing that DXT5nm format is perfectly fine for up to 64k normal maps and wins over (lossless) PNG in terms of speed (and storage size) by a big margin...My tools moreover optimize the dxt5nm rendering and project the normal map correctly on spheres rather than incorrectly on plane surfaces!

I start to open 8k planets from "Favourites" in a row. After 10-15 planets Celestia crashes. Just like that.

My estimate is that cca. 800-1000MB graphic data crashes Celestia.

It seems now that there should be another reason for the crashes. What I would do is to start up a debugger. Did you get any complaints in the "shaders.log" file? The latter is clearly the next stage of investigation.

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